The world is driven by data. It’s an instant world, where customers can make or break a business and the insights derived from data is the only thing that gives companies any indication of how to satisfy their markets.
By Adam Day, CEEMA storage category manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Data can deliver insights into shifting demographics, customer behaviour, operational efficiencies and inefficiencies, and enable a world where instant product feedback and satisfaction is expected.
However, data is accumulating at a rate faster than most businesses can cope with and in addition, often don’t have the skills to effectively manage it. Further exacerbating this is the emergence of technologies such as cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) coupled with traditional core data that has accelerated data growth. Data is also now created and stored everywhere, adding to the growing complexity.
For businesses, this means that their data storage needs to do more than just store data.
Intelligent storage
Data storage has come a long way since the humble hard drive. We’ve moved from traditional to converged to hyperconverged storage, where flash arrays offer cloud or cloud-like storage capabilities. However, storage has also evolved through intelligence.
The addition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to storage has made it more efficient, more economical and more capable than ever before.
Today, we see storage that has become intelligent enough to understand and interpret a business’ workload, shifting to accommodate as they vary. It can adjust the performance of data based on its location and demand in real-time, moving it to where it’s needed most. It can optimise data to adapt to the economic model most suited to a business.
Intelligent storage doesn’t just deliver insights into the business, it also leverages data from a vast network of data storage systems and a pool of historical data about data (metadata) to optimise itself, ushering in an era of autonomous storage.
Autonomous storage
Today’s storage is self-aware, context-aware, and autonomous. Imagine data storage that is fully capable of not just storing and managing a business’s data but can also self-manage, self-heal and self-optimise?
AI allows a storage system to leverage telemetry data from around the world, observing and learning in order to identify common data problems and address t